Relative Salience Research Articles

Relative saliency model over multiple images with an application to yarn surface evaluation.

Saliency models have been developed and widely demonstrated to benefit applications in computer vision and image understanding. In most of existing models, saliency is evaluated within an individual image. That is, saliency value of an item (object/region/pixel) represents the conspicuity of it as compared with the remaining items in the same image. We call this saliency as absolute saliency, which is uncomparable among images. However, saliency should be determined in the context of multiple images for some visual inspection tasks. For example, in yarn surface evaluation, saliency of a yarn image should be measured with regard to a set of graded standard images. We call this saliency the relative saliency, which is comparable among images. In this paper, a study of visual attention model for comparison of multiple images is explored, and a relative saliency model of multiple images is proposed based on a combination of bottom-up and top-down mechanisms, to enable relative saliency evaluation for the cases where other image contents are involved. To fully characterize the differences among multiple images, a structural feature extraction strategy is proposed, where two levels of feature (high-level, low-level) and three types of feature (global, local-local, local-global) are extracted. Mapping functions between features and saliency values are constructed and their outputs reflect relative saliency for multiimage contents instead of single image content. The performance of the proposed relative saliency model is well demonstrated in a yarn surface evaluation. Furthermore, the eye tracking technique is employed to verify the proposed concept of relative saliency for multiple images.

What is the relationship between online activity and driving-licence-holding amongst young adults?

There is growing interest amongst both practitioners and researchers in the correlates of young adults’ driving-licence-acquisition. One aspect of the ongoing scholarly debate is whether taking part in online (i.e. virtual) activities may be associated with young adults feeling less need to drive and hence to acquire a driving licence. This paper addresses this issue by drawing on analysis of two distinct datasets. Both contain rich pseudo-diary instruments in which people indicate detailed characteristics of their unique online-activity profile. This includes both indicators of the types of online activities in which respondents participate, and a separate metric of internet-use intensity. The latter is defined in one dataset as the amount of time/week spent online, and in the other dataset the frequency of their internet use. On the basis of a set of multivariate regression analyses, a positive (i.e. complementary) cross-sectional relationship between young adults’ online activity and licence-holding was found. We find that young adults who use the internet are, net of confounding effects, more likely to hold a driving licence than otherwise identical young adults who do not use the internet. Both datasets show this type of effect, and it is robust across a range of model specifications, including multi-stage estimations to address cross-correlation between indicators of internet usage. In addition to the positive net statistical association, we also report several other noteworthy effects. Of the six effects associated with online-activity types that are directly comparable between the two datasets, we find that the correlation in the parameter estimates across the two datasets is 0.63. This suggests similar types of relationships across the two datasets. Also, in several (but not all) of our analyses we found an inverted ‘U’ shaped ceteris paribus relationship between intensity-of-internet-use and licence-holding. The positive net statistical association between internet use and licence-holding is a different relationship than previously reported in the literature, and therefore further research is needed to reconcile the differences (which are likely due at least in part to different methodological approaches and data resources). Further research is also needed to continue to resolve between the relative saliency of other hypothesised determinants of licence-holding (e.g. economic and socio-demographic explanators, as well as licence-acquisition regimes that vary by time and place).

Economic nationalism and cosmopolitanism

Purpose – The purpose of this study is to investigate the differential influences of economic nationalism (EN) and cosmopolitanism (COS) on consumer behaviour, and how the two concepts are underpinned by different (normative versus informational) interpersonal influences. Design/methodology/approach – Surveys took place in two countries, South Korea (n = 257) and Taiwan (n = 258). Both are rapidly developing economies with a cosmopolitan consumer base. Two products, one representing conspicuous and one representing non-conspicuous categories, were used in each country’s survey. The data were subjected to exploratory and confirmation factor analyses and fitted using structural equation modelling. Findings – Contrary to past studies, EN and COS were unrelated. Economic nationalism was strong and biased towards domestic products. The results also suggest that COS may be related to bias against domestic products. EN related strongly to normative influence, whereas COS rested on informational influence. The results were similar across the countries and the product types. Research limitations/implications – Economic nationalism and COS may coexist as consumer dispositions and their relative salience may vary across individuals. Foreign firms should not overlook consumers’ nationalistic sentiment, just as domestic firms may capitalise on it. Both foreign and domestic firms can capitalise on consumer nationalism by highlighting benefits such as domestic employment and wealth creation. Practical implications – EN and COS may coexist as consumer dispositions, and their relative salience may vary across individuals. When managing their brand portfolio, foreign firms would benefit from considering consumers’ nationalistic sentiment, just as domestic firms may capitalise on it. Both foreign and domestic firms can capitalise on consumer nationalism by highlighting social benefits such as domestic employment and wealth creation. Originality/value – This study brings research on EN and COS from a macro/country level to a micro/individual level. It provides theoretical and empirical insights on the differential influences of EN and COS on consumer behaviour and sheds light on their psychological underpinnings.

Social Salience and the Sociolinguistic Monitor

This article examines the role of social salience, or the relative ability of a linguistic variable to evoke social meaning, in structuring listeners’ perceptions of quantitative sociolinguistic distributions. Building on the foundational work of Labov et al. (2006, 2011) on the “sociolinguistic monitor” (a proposed cognitive mechanism responsible for sociolinguistic perception), we examine whether listeners’ evaluative judgments of speech change as a function of the type of variable presented. We consider two variables in British English, ING and TH-fronting, which we argue differ in their relative social salience. Replicating the design of Labov et al.’s studies, we test 149 British listeners’ reactions to different quantitative distributions of these variables. Our experiments elicit a very different pattern of perceptual responses than those reported previously. In particular, our results suggest that a variable’s social salience determines both whether and how it is perceptually evaluated. We argue that this finding is crucial for understanding how sociolinguistic information is cognitively processed.

Saliency Prediction on Stereoscopic Videos

We describe a new 3D saliency prediction model that accounts for diverse low-level luminance, chrominance, motion, and depth attributes of 3D videos as well as high-level classifications of scenes by type. The model also accounts for perceptual factors, such as the nonuniform resolution of the human eye, stereoscopic limits imposed by Panum's fusional area, and the predicted degree of (dis) comfort felt, when viewing the 3D video. The high-level analysis involves classification of each 3D video scene by type with regard to estimated camera motion and the motions of objects in the videos. Decisions regarding the relative saliency of objects or regions are supported by data obtained through a series of eye-tracking experiments. The algorithm developed from the model elements operates by finding and segmenting salient 3D space-time regions in a video, then calculating the saliency strength of each segment using measured attributes of motion, disparity, texture, and the predicted degree of visual discomfort experienced. The saliency energy of both segmented objects and frames are weighted using models of human foveation and Panum's fusional area yielding a single predictor of 3D saliency.

Role of Geography in the Relative Salience of the Antecedents of Cruise Passengers' Satisfaction

While it is quite straightforward to determine the factors that satisfy cruise passengers, such as dining, entertainment, etc., it is a challenge to determine their relative importance. A cruise firm with limited resources needs to concentrate its resources chiefly on those aspects of the cruise travel experience that its customers value more. Unfortunately the findings in the academic literature about the relative importance of the determinants of cruise passengers’ satisfaction provide little guidance as they rarely converge across studies. We offer an explanation for this lack of convergence among the different studies about the relative importance of determinants. We believe that cruise customers who go to different locations form different market segments, with their own unique preferences. The differences in previous studies are due to the data being collected from different locations. We collect a unique dataset from an online website about cruise reviews, and use it to provide empirical support for our explanations. We find that while all consumers prefer value for money the most, the second most important factor is public rooms for tourists headed to Alsaka, cabins for the ones headed to Mediterranean, and service for the ones headed to Caribbean. The findings of this study would be of value to the management of cruise companies in refining advertising message, provision of different cruise services, etc.

Dopamine, urges to smoke, and the relative salience of drug versus non-drug reward

When addicted individuals are exposed to drug-related stimuli, dopamine release is thought to mediate incentive salience attribution, increasing attentional bias, craving and drug seeking. It is unclear whether dopamine acts specifically on drug cues versus other rewards, and if these effects correspond with craving and other forms of cognitive bias. Here, we administered the dopamine D2/D3 agonist pramipexole (0.5 mg) to 16 tobacco smokers in a double-blind placebo-controlled crossover design. Visual fixations on smoking and money images were recorded alongside smoking urges and fluency tasks. Pramipexole attenuated a marked bias in initial orienting towards smoking relative to money but did not alter a maintained attentional bias towards smoking. Pramipexole decreased urges to smoke retrospectively after the task but not on a state scale. Fewer smoking words were generated after pramipexole but phonological and semantic fluency were preserved. Although these treatment effects did not correlate with each other, changes in initial orienting towards smoking and money were inversely related to baseline scores. In conclusion, pramipexole can reduce the salience of an addictive drug compared with other rewards and elicit corresponding changes in smoking urges and cognitive bias. These reward-specific and baseline-dependent effects support an 'inverted-U' shaped profile of dopamine in addiction.

On the relative detectability of configural properties

A match-to-sample shape-discrimination task was employed to measure the detectability of different types of transformations. To create the foils for this task, the standard object could be altered by adding a small hole (a topological property), adding small bumps to straight edges (a projective property), changing the relative orientations of parallel contours (an affine property), or stretching the standard object to alter its aspect ratio (a Euclidean property). The results revealed that the relative perceptual salience of different types of shape change is consistent with the Klein hierarchy of geometries. That is to say observers were most sensitive to changes in topological structure, followed by changes in projective, affine, and Euclidean structure, respectively. The predicted patterns of performance among the different conditions were computed using a wide variety of commonly used shape-difference metrics, but none of them had a significant positive correlation with the observers' thresholds.

Relative salience versus relative validity: Cue salience influences blocking in human associative learning.

Two studies of human contingency learning investigated the influence of stimulus salience on the cue competition effect of blocking. These studies demonstrated that blocking (defined as a difference in responding to blocked and control cues) was greater for target cues that had high "semantic salience" than those of lower salience. Moreover participants showed weaker responding to high salience blocked cues than low salience blocked cues, but a corresponding difference was not observed for control cues. These findings suggest that the influence of relative salience on associative learning depends on the relative validity of the cues in question. Use of eye tracking in Experiment 2 demonstrated that participants' overt attention to cues was also influenced by both relative salience and relative validity. We describe three associative learning models, based on the attentional theory proposed by Mackintosh (1975), that are able to account for our key findings.

Analyzing Internal Stakeholders’ Salience in Product Development

Many companies apply Design for X principles to consider production and product lifecycle cost implications in the early phase of product development. In these companies, representatives of different Design for X disciplines form a specific group of internal stakeholders. This single case study constructs a stakeholder salience assessment framework and uses the framework to analyze internal stakeholders’ salience in product development in the case company. As the main result, the compared stakeholders are sequenced and their relative saliences are valued and visualized. In that single case, product management representatives perceived Design for Testing as clearly the most salient stakeholder being four times more salient than Design for Packaging. The framework and assessment procedure are applicable to use in other contexts and companies. This study exemplifies usage of the framework but the results are not generalizable. After salience assessment a company may take corrective actions to increase or decrease the salience of specific stakeholder group, to disband an internal stakeholder group, to consolidate some stakeholder groups together, or to segregate a Design for X group into several groups. The novel approach of this study is to apply the stakeholder salience assessment framework in product development context.

Visual salience can co-exist with dilution during visual selection.

The perceptual load theory contends that the locus of visual selection is dependent on the availability of perceptual resources, and findings have shown significant distractor interference under conditions of low perceptual load, but not under conditions of high perceptual load. Recently, other researchers have suggested that this pattern of distractor interference may actually be due to changes in the quality of the distractor's representation (known as the dilution account) and/or changes in its relative salience (known as the salience account). The present study attempted to advance theoretical understanding of visual selection by comparing the effects of high versus low visual salience while holding the effects of perceptual load and dilution constant. The results of two experiments showed that the relative salience of the distractor influenced the magnitude of distractor interference under these conditions. These results suggest that the effects of visual salience can coexist with the effects of dilution (and load).

Can theories of animal discrimination explain perceptual learning in humans?

We present a review of recent studies of perceptual learning conducted with nonhuman animals. The focus of this research has been to elucidate the mechanisms by which mere exposure to a pair of similar stimuli can increase the ease with which those stimuli are discriminated. These studies establish an important role for 2 mechanisms, one involving inhibitory associations between the unique features of the stimuli, the other involving a long-term habituation process that enhances the relative salience of these features. We then examine recent work investigating equivalent perceptual learning procedures with human participants. Our aim is to determine the extent to which the phenomena exhibited by people are susceptible to explanation in terms of the mechanisms revealed by the animal studies. Although we find no evidence that associative inhibition contributes to the perceptual learning effect in humans, initial detection of unique features (those that allow discrimination between 2 similar stimuli) appears to depend on an habituation process. Once the unique features have been detected, a tendency to attend to those features and to learn about their properties enhances subsequent discrimination. We conclude that the effects obtained with humans engage mechanisms additional to those seen in animals but argue that, for the most part, these have their basis in learning processes that are common to animals and people. In a final section, we discuss some implications of this analysis of perceptual learning for other aspects of experimental psychology and consider some potential applications.

Performance of C57BL/6J and DBA/2J mice on a touchscreen-based attentional set-shifting task

Attentional set-shifting deficits are a feature of multiple psychiatric disorders. However, the neurogenetic mechanisms underlying these deficits are largely unknown. In the present study we assessed performance of C57BL/6J and DBA/2J mice on a touchscreen-based attentional set-shifting task similar to those used with humans and non-human primates. In experiment 1, mice discriminated simple white lines followed by compound stimuli composed of white lines superimposed on grey shapes. Although performance of the two strains was largely equivalent during early stages of the task, DBA/2J mice committed significantly more errors compared to C57BL/6J mice on the extra-dimensional shift. Additionally, performance of mice as a group declined across the three compound discrimination reversals. In experiment 2 we assessed salience of the shapes and lines dimensions and determined if dimensional salience, a variable previously shown to affect set-shifting abilities in humans and non-human primates, could be systematically manipulated. Findings from experiment 2 suggested that strain differences during the extra-dimensional shift in experiment 1 were most parsimoniously explained by a consistently impaired ability in DBA/2J mice to discriminate a subset of the compound stimuli. Additionally, unlike maze-based tasks, the relative salience of the two dimensions could be manipulated by systematically altering the width of lines exemplars while retaining other potentially-relevant attributes of the compound stimuli. These findings reveal unique and in some cases strain-dependent phenomena related to discriminations of simple and multidimensional visual stimuli which may facilitate future efforts to identify and fully characterize visual discrimination, reversal learning, and attentional set-shifting deficits in mice.

Early top-down control over saccadic target selection: Evidence from a systematic salience difference manipulation

Previous research on the contribution of top-down control to saccadic target selection has suggested that eye movements, especially short-latency saccades, are primarily salience driven. The present study was designed to systematically examine top-down influences as a function of time and relative salience difference between target and distractor. Observers performed a saccadic selection task, requiring them to make an eye movement to an orientation-defined target, while ignoring a color-defined distractor. The salience of the distractor was varied (five levels), permitting the percentage of target and distractor fixations to be analyzed as a function of the salience difference between the target and distractor. This analysis revealed the same pattern of results for both the overall and the short-latency saccades: When the target and distractor were of comparable salience, the vast majority of saccades went directly to the target; even distractors somewhat more salient than the target led to significantly fewer distractor, as compared with target, fixations. To quantify the amount of top-down control applied, we estimated the point of equal selection probability for the target and distractor. Analyses of these estimates revealed that, to be selected with equal probability to the target, a distractor had to have a considerably greater bottom-up salience, as compared with the target. This difference suggests a strong contribution of top-down control to saccadic target selection-even for the earliest saccades.

Being All Things to All Customers: Building Reputation in an Institutionalized Field

This paper seeks to draw empirical attention to the relationship between legitimacy and reputation in institutionalized fields. Norwegian hospitals find themselves in a strongly institutionalized field and do not want to differentiate from each other, despite seeking a favorable reputation. In order to acquire insights into the conditions that prompt organizations to reject differentiation, we carried out qualitative interviews with the hospitals’ communication directors. Three sets of justifications for not differentiating emerged from an inductive analysis of these interviews. Differentiation is not adapted to the universalistic needs of the hospitals, not in accordance with solidarity norms, and not a pragmatic solution. The analysis suggests that the hospitals face a trade‐off between the contradictory demands of similarity and difference and hence legitimacy and reputation: They renounce the advantage of a unique reputation (i.e. competitive advantage) in order to retain the benefits of conformity (i.e. legitimacy). Implications of these findings for our understanding of the relative salience of legitimacy and reputation and the dynamics between them are discussed.

Citizenship across generations: struggles around heteronormativities

This article argues for the importance of attention to intergenerational relations in understanding the conditions for access to citizenship rights and recognition for non-heterosexual people. The case of Italy, where individual entitlements and responsibilities are largely structured around intergenerational dependence, underlines the salience of intergenerational relations in relation to sexual citizenship. Drawing on a study of the families of origin of self-identified young gay men and lesbians carried out in Italy, this article explores how access to citizenship rights and the construction of the identities that can claim recognition are mediated by processes of mutual disclosure and negotiation within families. Beyond a shared notion of family ties as defined by unconditional love, a diversity of narratives are detected, linked to differences in gender, class and family cultures. It is especially when family narratives are informed by the middle-class ideology of the democratic family as a space for the development of authentic selves that access to rights becomes conditional upon compliance with the obligations of a ‘good child’, and the conditions for the reproduction of heteronormative citizenship are set.

Party Unity in the Swiss Parliament: The Electoral Connection

This study investigates the connection between legislative and electoral politics in Switzerland. The authors postulate that party unity is higher in an election year, and more specifically in votes on issues that are important for the party platform and that are of greater visibility to voters. The authors analyse the entire voting record of the Swiss parliament (lower house) on legislative acts between 1996 and 2007, which consists of roll call votes as well as unpublished votes. The authors find a strong effect of elections on voting unity among certain parties, and also find encouraging support for the hypotheses that this effect is mediated by the visibility of the vote and related issue salience.

Preferences for social protection: Theory and empirics

Empirical cross-country evidence suggests that countries position themselves along a sort of Market Regulation (MR)-Social Expenditure (SE) trade-off “line”. Theoretically, it is clear that there exists a certain degree of substitutability between SE and MR, since both can provide a cushion against socio-economic risks. However, market regulation is an inefficient means to provide protection, since it might reduce productivity and the employment level. Still, to be politically viable efficiency-enhancing deregulation policies must come along with appropriate fiscal measures (social protection spending) to compensate the losers of reforms or to accommodate any temporary negative effect on aggregate demand. This implies that the political determinants of MR and SE should be jointly analyzed to explain both the multiplicity of stable combinations of MR and SE empirically observed, and the strong political resistance often encountered in the implementation of structural reforms. The focus of this paper is a theoretical and empirical (using microdata from the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP)) investigation on the socio-economic, institutional and cultural factors which shape voters' preferences for MR and SE and determine the relative salience of the two political issues. Such an analysis should provide fundamental pieces of information to carry out a proper analysis of the political process to give account of the multiplicity of combinations of MR and SE empirically observed.

A novel multi-scale relative salience feature for remote sensing image analysis

This paper presents a novel feature for remote sensing image analysis, called multi-scale relative salience (MsRS) feature. It is constructed by modeling the process of feature value changing with scales. Firstly, the multi-scale observation values at each site are obtained by convolved with recursive Gaussian filters for efficiency. Secondly, the multi-scale observation values are compared with the initial value to generate the relative salience. Lastly, the relative salience between multi-scales are embed into a single feature called the MsRS. The scale in MsRS has explicit spatial meaning which is convenient to choose appropriate scale for specified object. In the MsRS map, the inner of each object become more consistent, while the contrast between object and background is enlarged. The MsRS can be used as preprocessing step of many applications, such as segmentation. Two state-of-art segmentations (the mean shift and the statistical region merging) are taken into experiments and the results proved that it brings improvement obviously.

Effects of Pulvinar Inactivation on Spatial Decision-making between Equal and Asymmetric Reward Options

The ability to selectively process visual inputs and to decide between multiple movement options in an adaptive manner is critical for survival. Such decisions are known to be influenced by factors such as reward expectation and visual saliency. The dorsal pulvinar connects to a multitude of cortical areas that are involved in visuospatial memory and integrate information about upcoming eye movements with expected reward values. However, it is unclear whether the dorsal pulvinar is critically involved in spatial memory and reward-based oculomotor decision behavior. To examine this, we reversibly inactivated the dorsal portion of the pulvinar while monkeys performed a delayed memory saccade task that included choices between equally or unequally rewarded options. Pulvinar inactivation resulted in a delay of saccade initiation toward memorized contralesional targets but did not affect spatial memory. Furthermore, pulvinar inactivation caused a pronounced choice bias toward the ipsilesional hemifield when the reward value in the two hemifields was equal. However, this choice bias could be alleviated by placing a high reward target into the contralesional hemifield. The bias was less affected by the manipulation of relative visual saliency between the two competing targets. These results suggest that the dorsal pulvinar is involved in determining the behavioral desirability of movement goals while being less critical for spatial memory and reward processing.